Dear Diary: It's Nobody's Business

Not that I was overconfident or anything, but I'd already picked out the brand of TV I was going to buy with the $500 grand prize in the National Dear Diary Day essay contest.

The topic for the contest, for which entries must be postmarked no later than Thursday, is "Why I Keep A Diary." Longtime proponent of journal-keeping that I am, I figured my only problem was going to be staying under the 200-word limit as I waxed profound and poetic about the benefits of correspondence with the soul.

The diary as refuge, as friend, as therapist and teacher. The diary as validator, as historian, as entertainer. All that.

But a sad realization scuttled this plan: I don't keep a diary anymore. I keep a datebook. It features an extra, blank page every day for what should be the continuation of the diaries that I began writing when I was 10 years old. But gradually, in recent years, this page has turned into little more than a sketchy chronicle of comings and goings.

Here, for example, is the entire entry for Sunday, Sept. 4: "To Chuck and Barb's for pizza."

At one time, in the days before I wrote my Dear Diary a Dear John letter, I might have committed an analysis of the dinner to paper-taken stock of my mood, recorded some of the snappier mots and disclosed and amplified upon my persistent envy that Chuck and Barb have a bigger house and newer car than we do.

Not that Dame Posterity will suffer the loss. But still, as the first National Dear Diary Day approaches Thursday, I'm left answering the opposite of the essay question: Why do I no longer keep a diary?

Lack of time is one excuse, but a false one. In just the time I've spent looking for lost golf balls among the trees this summer, I could have written scores of ponderous pages assessing myself and others.

But such assessments now wear me out. I'm tired of making note of the same old doubts, certitudes, resolutions and failings, and my critical insights into others long ago began to sound shrill and picky to my own ear.

I also find that the grand mysteries of life and love I dissected with such callow earnestness when I first discovered them no longer seem solvable. At the same time, that insolubility has come to strike me as ordinary and predictable, not intriguing.

Not to say that my life and thoughts have become dull to me. It's just that I've come to see that they're a lot more typical than I once believed. History does not demand that I memorialize the nuances of every dinner party I attend. In fact, history's eyes are already glazed over.

But by far the biggest reason I no longer write in a diary is that I stopped trusting it to keep my secrets. In high school and college, I wrote down with frank, self-obsessed abandon every juicy, appalling, pathetic, incorrect and indiscreet thought.

Yet as the pages accumulated, I became aware of an inherent contradiction: You must never destroy your diary for it to have its full value, but to preserve it virtually guarantees that someone else, at some time, will read it. And when you begin to write with that someone else in mind-a descendant, a future scholar or just a nosy spouse-you are no longer writing to yourself, for yourself. You are writing a letter. So you omit. You preen. You shade the truth.

And you're a fool if you don't. Even if your family and your roommates respect your privacy, the courts don't. Lusty Sen. Bob Packwood (R-Ore.) had to turn over his personal diaries to the Senate ethics committee in March after the Supreme Court rejected his constitutional claims for privacy; U.S. Treasury Department officials John Steiner and Roger Altman had to cough up their diaries' secrets during the Whitewater probe and, closer to home, Crystal Lake Mayor George Wells has had to hand over his 6,000-page diary in recent years to two parties challenging him in court.

I have no plans to be subpoenaed, of course. Who ever does? But if it happens, unless the scandal involves questionable tax write-offs for pizza dinners, my paper trail will be clean. I will be able to answer my interrogators with the same words, the sad words, with which I will one day have to answer many questions from my family: